Constitucional Patriotism and the Post-Secular Society: on the Question of "reasonable accommodation" in Quebec

ABSTRACT: In Canadian politics, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission marked the real entrance of the question of religious plurality into the multicultural debate and drew the latter into the legal domain. In constitutional terms, the upshot would seem to be that, for the sake of integrating immigration communities, faith ought to be granted greater conceptual and argumentative value than culture, be that understood as the political culture at the State level or broader lifestyle issues as understood as taking place in civil society. In light of this debate, it is appropriate to examine Charles Taylor‟s views on religion and secularism. Taylor‟s views on multiculturalism confronted a singularity int he domestic affairs of the very province whose existence at the transnational level, i.e. in Canadian Confederation, gave much of the spark to his work on the politics of recognition. What he has advocated for Quebec as part of his work with the Commission by means of the concept of “interculturalism” is more akin to the recent positions put forward by Jürgen Habermas on the idea of a postsecular society, especially in light of his thought on constitutional patriotism. In this paper, we should like to argue that thechances for a broader and more inclusive concept of Quebec‟s specificity at the internal domestic level, lies in a remodeling of its historical narrative according to the terms of constitutional patriotism. Quebec‟s newfound religious diversity is the key integrative operator to this model.KEYWORDS: Quebec; reasonable accommodation; constitutional patriotism; postsecular society; interculturalism; Taylor-Bouchard Commission